Text Grammar studies

The main trends of text linguistics

Lecturer: D.U. Ashurova

M.R. Galieva

The Main Trends of Text Linguistics

• General text theory
• Text Grammar
• Text Semantics
• Text stylistics and interpretation
• Text typology

General Text Theory

General text theory discusses:

• outline of text linguistics as a branch of general linguistics, its history, evolution, approaches, directions, its object and subject, the main tasks;
• definition of “text”, its main features, categories and boundaries, principles of text construction and text perception;
• links between text linguistics and other sciences.

The object and subject of Text Linguistics

The object of text linguistics is a text as a complex communicative unit, as a sequence of verbal signs, as “language-in- action”.

The subject of text linguistics depends on the aim of investigation. It might be the semantic, structural, grammatical, stylistic, communicative, pragmatic, cognitive and other aspects of the text.

Text delimitation

Text delimitation means the boundaries of the text, its upper and lower borderlines, its length.

Accordingly the following types of texts are distinguished:

• Microtexts - complex syntactical units (proverbs, sayings, aphorisms)
• Macrotexts – are presented by a story, novel or a monograph.

Text Grammar

Text Grammar studies:

• Structural and semantic integrity of the text;
• Text segmentation;
• Lexical and grammatical cohesion;
• Thematic and rhematic aspects of the text;
• Compositional structure;
• Sentence arrangement in the text;
• Text-forming functions of linguistic units;
• Text delimitation.

The notion of Cohesion

Cohesion is the correlation of the text components, forms of connections between separate parts of the text

There are the following types of grammatical cohesion:

● participial constructions;

● the choice of articles;

● the use of tenses;

● forms of enumeration (firstly, secondly, on the one hand…on the other hand);

● deixis (pronouns, adverbs of time and place: soon, tomorrow, here, there, etc);

● parallel constructions;

● graphic means: a); b); c); 1); 2); 3);

● recurrence, i.e. repetition of words, word combinations, phrases, etc.

Text semantics

Text semantics covers a wide range of problems:

● semantic and thematic integrity of the text;

● the main units of the semantic structure of the text;

● the correlation of the surface layer of the text and its content, interaction of “surface” and “deep” structures;

● the correlation of the linguistic and extralinguistic factors of the text;

● content analysis of the text.

Content analysis

Content analysis consists of:

• Searching for the key elements of the text;
• Defining primary thematic chain – themes;
• Defining secondary thematic chains (subthemes, microthemes)
• Establishing hierarchical interrelations between themes subthemes and microthemes.